Review by New York Times Review
"I'm a bit unconvinced by reality," says Anais Hendricks, the heroine of Jenni Fagan's debut novel, "The Panopticon." "It's fundamentally lacking in something, and nobody seems bothered." When we first meet Anais she is handcuffed in the back of a police car, her school uniform covered in blood, on her way to an institution for young offenders. She has no family, and has never seen so much as a photograph of any relatives. Her hobbies include joy riding, tripping on school days, painting CCTV cameras fluorescent pink and hand-delivering the lights from police cars, covered with glitter, to the desk of her local constabulary. Now 15, she still feels "2 years old and ready tae bite." She is, in summary, "totally and utterly" messed up - "but I like pillbox hats." She is also the best reason to pick up "The Panopticon," Fagan's pugnacious, snub-nosed paean to the highs and lows of juvenile delinquency. A student of Andrew Motion's with several books of poetry to her name (a name that calls to mind the patron saint of literary street urchins), Fagan has given us one of the most spirited heroines to cuss, kiss, bite and generally break the nose of the English novel in many a moon. The novel takes its title from the imposing rehab facility, located deep in a forest, that waits for Anais at the end of that car ride: four floors high, in the shape of a C, and in the center a hidden core that looks out, through one-way glass, onto every cell, every landing, every bathroom. Students of 18th-century English penology will instantly recognize the reformer Jeremy Bentham's infamous plans for an omniscient prison, never built but later turned by the French philosopher Michel Foucault into a metaphor for the oppressive gaze of late capitalism. Students of 21st-century reality television will, on the other hand, instantly recognize the layout from the program "Big Brother," in which a bunch of undesirables argue, in close quarters, over who redecorated the living room lampshade with a pair of underpants. Where does Fagan's structure rest on the Bentham-to-"Big Brother" scale? Somewhere in the middle. The inmates. are locked up at night, but during the day are free to roam a lounge area, dining space and game room, all painted magnolia by well-meaning staff members who say things like "we practice a holistic approach tae client care at the Panopticon." Winston Smith never had it so good. Anais lands there after she's suspected of putting a policewoman into a coma, a crime for which she is regularly hauled into the interrogation room - but she cannot remember anything, having been on the tail-end of a four-day ketamine bender at the time. "I didnae tell the polis that," she confides. She also does not tell them she was so wrecked on drugs at the time, "I couldnae even mind my own name." She is soon bonding with her fellow inmates, swapping stories and swinging joints attached to shoelaces between the cells after lights out. There's the sicko who raped a dog, the boy who burned down the special-needs school where his foster mother taught "We send e-mails, start legends - create myths," she says. "It's the same in the nick or the nuthouse: notoriety is respect." What we have here is a fine example of Caledonian grunge, wherein writers north of the River Tweed grab the English language by the lapels, dunk it in the gutter and kick it into filthy, idiomatic life, thus leaving terrified book reviewers with no option but to find them "gritty" or "authentic." I have no way of knowing if the acid trip described here - which starts on the walk to school, then lurches sideways to a tower block for another drug run before concluding with a police bust - is authentic, having spent most of my school years protecting my privates from oncoming soccer balls, but there is no resisting the tidal rollout of Fagan's imagery. Her prose beats behind your eyelids, the flow of images widening to a glittering delta whenever Anais approaches the vexed issue of her origins: "Born in the bushes by a motorway. Born in a VW with its doors open to the sea. Born in Harvey Nichols between the fur coats and the perfume, aghast store staff faint . . . Born in an igloo. Born in a castle. Born in a tepee while the moon rises and a midsummer powwow pounds the ground outside." Solving this mystery - cracking Anais open - soon supplants the cop-in-a-coma as the book's main narrative focus, as is only right, since "The Panopticon" is primarily, and triumphantly, a voice-driven novel. Fagan's prose rhythm and use of the demotic may owe something to Irvine Welsh, but there is a poet's precision to some of the novel's more plumed excursions. I, for one, was as grateful for those fur coats and that perfume as I was for the acid trips and dog rapes, the school of Welsh having long ago seized up, sclerotically, with its own druggie braggadocio. "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face," Updike said. Reading Welsh's most recent work, you sense a writer trying, but unable, to break out of the rough bark in which early success has encased him. He could do worse than to study the warmer emotional temperature of Fagan's book, or the way she uses it to defrost her battle-hardened heroine - the "girl with a shark's heart" who cleaves to her own moral code ("you dinnae bully people, ever") and who finds herself fighting back unaccustomed tears when a fellow inmate commits suicide. "I wish that would stop," she says of this "teary" stuff. But it won't. Under the guidance of Angus, the one support worker she likes - possibly because of his green dreadlocks and Doc Marten boots - Anais retraces her tangled journey: her 147 criminal charges, her years in foster care, her possible birth in an asylum, where they find a mad old monk, guarded by gargoyles, who claims to have laid eyes on her "bio mum," although Anais remains convinced that "in all actuality they grew me - from a bit of bacteria in a petri dish. An experiment, created and raised just to see exactly how much . . . a nobody from nowhere can take." Sometimes Anais catches glimpses of men behind the prison windows, men with no noses in shiny shoes and black wide-rimmed hats - or are they just an acid flashback? Do we really believe she is being watched? Anais and her fellows are too free to come and go (there are boat trips and double dates, even spending money) for the Panopticon to strike a truly Orwellian note. If this is Orwellianism it's the well-meaning Orwellianism of the modern European welfare state. With its orphaned heroine, retro prison design and Gothic accouterments, "The Panopticon" glances instead back to "Jane Eyre" and all those other 19th-century novels in which children trace their parentage through a perilous maze of orphanages and poorhouses, those hulking, soot-stained establishments now having made way for the bright, Formica-covered spaces of the modernday detention center and rehab facility. Like Stieg Larsson, to whose Lisbeth Salander the spunky Anais also owes a small debt, Fagan plugs into our fears of youth brutalized by the very system that is supposed to care for it, while upending those fears with a heroine who would rather choke than ask for our pity: "I hate saying please," Anais tells us. "It makes me feel cheap. I hate saying thank you. I hate saying I need anything." But Fagan's voice is her own, a pure descant, rising from the fray like a chorister in a scrum. "Vive le girls," she writes, with "hips and perfumes and perfumers. Vive absinthe and cobbled streets, vive le sea! Vive riots and old porn, and dragonflies; vive rooms with huge windows and unlockable doors. Vive flying cats and cigarillo-smoking Outcast Queens!" Vive them all, yes indeed, and vive Jenni Fagan, too, whose next book just moved into my "eagerly anticipated" pile. Fagan plugs into our fears of youth brutalized by the very system that is supposed to be caring for it. Tom Shone's new book, "Scorsese: A Retrospective" will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Anais Hendricks, the tough, fiery 15-year-old at the center of Fagan's first novel, has grown up in the foster care system in England. Abandoned by her mother, who gave birth to her in a mental institution, Anais has been bounced around ever since the murder of Theresa, a compassionate prostitute and the only mother figure Anais has ever known. Anais is brought to the Panopticon, a halfway house for truant teens, after she's accused of brutally beating a police officer and leaving her in a coma. Anais, who was hopped up on drugs at the time, can't remember whether she's guilty or not. The police are gunning for her, determined to send Anais to juvenile detention until she's 18. At the Panopticon, Anais is convinced she's being watched as part of a sinister experiment, the purpose of which, she believes, is to try to bring her down and all but eradicate her from society. Told in Anais' raw voice, Fagan's novel peers into the world inhabited by forgotten children, and, in Anais, gives us a heartbreakingly intelligent and sensitive heroine wrapped in an impossibly impenetrable exterior. Readers won't be able to tear themselves away from this transcendent debut.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
After an altercation with authorities leaves an officer in a coma, 15-year-old Anais Hendricks finds herself shuttled off to the Panopticon, a care center for young, chronic offenders modeled after the prison designs of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Amid the institution's crescent-shaped buildings and all-seeing watchtower, Anais befriends a group of ragtag ruffians and delves into her past, endlessly stoned and concerned she's being watched by an entity she calls "the experiment." Fagan's debut, voiced in a frenetic, robust Scottish inflection, weaves together mystery and coming-of-age elements to create a tale filled with dread and humor. Though Anais tries to clear her name and remember what transpired between her and the injured officer (she was under the influence at the time) the novel dwells less on her fate and finds stronger focus on the bonds between residents. Fagan constantly fluctuates between scenes of distress-as when a stoned resident leaps from a window-and scenes of typical teenager behavior: smoking, dating, debating about superpowers, and playing Truth or Dare? Anais's story is one of abandonment, loss, and redemption, well suited for a paranoid age in which society finds itself constantly under the microscope. Agent: Wylie Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The police in Midlothian, Scotland, have decided that 15-year-old Anais Hendricks is responsible for putting an officer into a coma. Anais never knew her mother and has lived "in care" her entire life. She has developed numerous coping skills, including a tough exterior, a willingness to use violence, and a taste for drugs. Anais lands in the Panopticon, a spooky former prison where all cells are visible from a central point. In this refurbished youth home, she meets other troubled teens with whom she quickly bonds. Their various issues include self-harm, HIV, and casual prostitution. The grand question is, will Anais survive a nightmarish personal betrayal and avoid lockdown? Scotland-born writer and poet Fagan (twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, short-listed for the Dundee International Book Prize, and named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013) debuts a captivating narrative whose pervasive profanity and colorful Scottish dialect combine to form evocative descriptions of mental and physical struggle. Anais's ongoing internal dialog, her periodic reimagining of her life and situation, is enthralling. VERDICT James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late meets Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Not to be missed.-Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Critically acclaimed in Britain, Scottish writer Fagan's U.S. debut limns life in a last-resort residence for teen outcasts. Like everyone else in the Panopticon, 15-year-old Anais Hendricks has been in and out of foster care practically since birth. "[B]orn in a nuthouse to nobody that was ever seen again," she had her only successful foster placement with a prostitute later stabbed to death (Anais found the body). She's been sent to this facility, where the inmates are under constant surveillance, because she had a bad history with a policewoman who has been bludgeoned into a coma, and Anais--almost permanently whacked on whatever drug she can lay her hands on--can't explain why she has blood on her skirt. If the police can prove she did it, she'll be locked up full-time until she's 18; meanwhile, she enjoys the relative freedom of the Panopticon and forms intense bonds with other residents. Isla, whose self-cutting has worsened since she learned that she passed HIV to her twins, has a history grimly typical of the kids dumped here by an indifferent society. Anais, as her sympathetic support worker Angus notices, is stronger, smarter and more resilient than her hapless peers. Readers discern Anais' difference from her first-person narration, a tart rendering in savory Scottish dialect of her bitter perceptions of the world that has no use for her, embodied in what she calls "the experiment," a mysterious group to which she ascribes vaguely supernatural powers. It's probably a delusion (remember all those drugs), but we're never quite sure; an almost unrelievedly grim parade of events reinforces Anais's perception that some sinister force is arrayed against her and her friends. The tentative happy ending snatched from near-certain disaster might seem like wish fulfillment if Fagan had not painted her battered characters' fierce loyalty to each other with such conviction and surprising tenderness. Dark and disturbing but also exciting and moving thanks to a memorable heroine and vividly atmospheric prose.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
